University of Virginia Library

10.13. 13. Charles XII.

This prince, who depended entirely on his own strength, hastened his ruin by forming designs that could never be executed but by a long war — a thing which his kingdom was unable to support.

It was not a declining state he undertook to subvert, but a rising empire. The Russians made use of the war he waged against them as of a military school. Every defeat brought them nearer to victory; and, losing abroad, they learned to defend themselves at home.

Charles, in the deserts of Poland, imagined himself sovereign of the whole world: here he wandered, and with him in some measure wandered Sweden; while his capital enemy acquired new strength against him, locked him up, made settlements along the Baltic, destroyed or subdued Livonia.

Sweden was like a river whose waters are cut off at the fountain head in order to change its course.

It was not the affair of Pultowa that ruined Charles. Had he not been destroyed at that place, he would have been in another. The casualties of fortune are easily repaired; but who can be guarded against events that incessantly arise from the nature of things?

But neither nature nor fortune were ever so much against him as he himself.

He was not directed by the present situation of things, but by a kind of plan of his forming; and even this he followed very ill. He was not an Alexander; but he would have made an excellent soldier under that monarch.

Alexander's project succeeded because it was prudently concerted. The bad success of the Persians in their several invasions of Greece, the conquests of Agesilaus, and the retreat of the ten thousand had shown to demonstration the superiority of the Greeks in their manner of fighting and in their arms; and it was well known that the Persians were too proud to be corrected.

It was no longer possible for them to weaken Greece by divisions: Greece was then united under one head, which could not pitch upon a better method of rendering her insensible to her servitude than by flattering her vanity with the destruction of her hereditary enemy, and with the hopes of the conquest of Asia.

An empire cultivated by the most industrious nation in the world, that followed agriculture from a principle of religion — an empire abounding with every convenience of life, furnished the enemy with all necessary means of subsisting.

It was easy to judge by the pride of those kings, who in vain were mortified by their numerous defeats, that they would precipitate their ruin by their forwardness in venturing battles; and that the flattery of their courtiers would never permit them to doubt of their grandeur.

The project was not only wise, but wisely executed. Alexander, in the rapidity of his conquests, even in the impetuosity of his passion, had, if I may so express myself, a flash of reason by which he was directed, and which those who would fain have made a romance of his history, and whose minds were more corrupt than his, could not conceal from our view. Let us descend more minutely into his history.